


With Only A Lexicon

by icarus_chained



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alien Abduction, Alien Technology, Allspeak, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Captivity, First Contact, Gen, Language Barrier, Languages and Linguistics, Magic vs Technology, Science Fiction, Tony Stark Hates Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 01:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony, Bruce, Thor and JARVIS examine what seems to be an alien golem that attacked New York, and slowly realise they may have made a <i>small</i> mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Only A Lexicon

**Author's Note:**

> Not so much a fic as a concept piece. I've been wanting to play with Thor, Tony, magic vs technology, and the issues with the Allspeak for a while now. This scene was the only thing that came out. Um. Apologies in advance?

Okay. Tony was just going to be honest, here. Magic, as a concept, only existed to fuck things up. This was a fact, this was a thing, he was _firmly convinced_ of this. Alien power sources and alternate energy profiles and whatever the hell you wanted, but this magic thing, energy channeled on circuits of words or blood or wishful goddamned thinking, it basically just made life _difficult_. And Tony did not approve of things that made life difficult. That, too, was a fact. That was _on record_.

The thing that had fallen out of the sky and attacked New York was, according to Thor, a golem. Well. He said according to Thor, Thor hadn't exactly been definitive on the issue. When faced with a metal humanoid figure animated by magic (or so they presumed, since there was no internal machinery or systems, just a lot of strange symbols inscribed over and over into the metal, covering the entire interior and a fair bit of the exterior too), the word that had come out of Thor's mouth had been 'golem'. And since Thor had the dubious honour of being the one of them most conversant with magic, that was what they were going with.

This was further clarified by Natasha, with what Tony swore was a tiny smirk in his direction, as more or less a magical robot. Sort of. Mostly. It was a magically-animated machine that ran in two modes: either by remote command from an operator, or by a limited command interface wherein you plugged in one command at a time (presumably, in this instance, 'attack New York until someone stops you') and the golem carried out that command until someone told it to stop or it broke, whichever happened first.

As far as Tony was concerned, that didn't count as a robot. It barely counted as a toaster. He had six different toasters back in the tower with more mechanical complexity than that. But, okay. They were dealing with magic, obviously it wasn't going to be as complex ...

Except, that was the thing. That was what was bugging him now, with the still-glowing carcass of the golem stretched out on the floor of the SHIELD hangar they'd commandeered, himself and Bruce poring over it, and Thor looming cheerfully over their shoulders and translating the symbols for them via Allspeak. That was what was niggling at him, as they ran fiber optic cameras up through the inside of the golem, the exploding diagram of the interior and its inscriptions hovering gently over their head on the fixed monitor, Thor carefully and painstakingly translating them as they went. That was what was worrying him, as a potentially alarming idea began to take hold in his head. 

'Golem', Thor had said first. But afterwards, it was even odds if the man said 'golem' or 'robot'. And Tony wasn't sure if that was for his benefit, if it was because Thor was making a deliberate effort to take Natasha's further translation on board for the sake of the technologically focused in the audience, or ...

From what Thor had said, magic and technology were considered largely interchangeable in Asgard. And the mechanism by which the Allspeak functioned wasn't clear, whether it was a biological translator programme or a magic spell or some form of, he didn't know, psychic field or something. So ... was Thor basically giving him a translation of a translation, whenever he remembered to bother, or was the Allspeak itself running into some minor problems regarding the difference between 'magic robot' (golem) and 'science robot' (robot)? And if it was, was that because of the Asgardian interchangeability between the fields, or was it because ...

"Hey, Bruce?" he asked, quietly. Very quietly, and there must have been something in his voice, because Bruce looked up immediately, staring curiously and warily at Tony from where he was braced over the upper torso of the thing. "Do me a favour, okay. Back up a few steps?"

Bruce blinked at him, brow furrowing, but he did as Tony asked, sliding back down off the chestpiece of the golem and raising an eyebrow. "Okay," the man said, tilting his head faintly. "Something wrong, Tony?"

Tony shook his head, shifting carefully where he was hunkered down next to the thing's head. "I'm not sure yet," he said. Looking between Bruce, wary and inquisitive beside him, and Thor, bemused but supportive over their shoulders. "There's a thing, give me a second. I've just had a very, very bad thought."

He flipped down the interface monitor they'd rigged up, when they'd cannibalised a monitor array from the labs. He wasn't particularly concerned with the projections, though. He was looking for something in particular. And ... there. The interior inscriptions from the head-like thing, annotated and partially translated with Thor's surprisingly patient help. Inscriptions they'd gained by sticking a microcamera basically up the golem's nostrils (which was bizarre on multiple levels, not least of which, _why did a robot need nostrils_?), because they hadn't yet gotten to the part where they broke the sucker open for more invasive testing.

Which, if he turned out to be right, might be the best argument for scientific process he'd yet come across.

"JARVIS?" he asked, watching the faint glow of the symbols against the darkness of the metal's interior. "Buddy? Am I being completely paranoid here, or ... are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

"Sir?" JARVIS answered. Mildly curious, not yet alarmed. So no, not seeing it yet. But Tony could fix that, give him two seconds, let him just type up a quick section of code to put up alongside the image ... " _Ah_ ," his AI said, a wealth of sudden understanding in his voice. "Yes, sir. I think ... that may well have merit. Give me a moment to run a comparison?"

Tony grinned uneasily, waving a hand as the images on the pull-down monitor flickered out, JARVIS busy running line-by-line comparisons somewhere deep and private in his own systems. JARVIS was good at this, JARVIS was nearly as fast at this as he was. Even with a shaky and partial translation via Allspeak, even with just the vocabulary and none of the grammar, hopefully he'd manage to come up with a feasibility rating.

And hopefully, that feasibility rating would be along the lines of 'you are a paranoid and ridiculous human being with a technology bias', or Tony was going to have to feel ... very, very ill, really.

"Tony?" Bruce asked, quietly. Barely ahead of Thor's: "Stark?" They were both looking down at him, Bruce with more active worry than Thor, who was mostly just being supportive and the kind of wary you got when a comrade in arms made that 'I think we may have just stepped _slightly_ wrong' face that Tony was pretty sure he was making right now. Funnily enough, Thor almost never paid attention to that sort of thing on actual battlefields. But put him out of his comfort zone and yeah, Thor could take cues with the best of them.

Tony redirected his grin from JARVIS to them, trying to ratchet the uneasiness down a notch. Not really succeeding, from the looks of things.

"It might be nothing," he temporised, waving a hand aimlessly. "Like I said, I could just be paranoid, or ... or trying to assign a technological explanation to a magical problem because my brain is in safe-mode." Fat chance, but anyway. "But ..."

Bruce raised that eyebrow again. "But?" he asked, with the genial resignation of a man with a lifetime of other shoes dropping behind him. In the face of it, Tony couldn't quite help letting his grin flash that little more real.

"But if I'm right," he said, smiling faintly at the man, "we might want to, ah, put the Helicarrier back on the ground, maybe? And put the squishy people and anyone not capable of standing up to this thing out of harms way."

Bruce blinked, carefully. "You think it's still active?" he asked. Not skeptically, bless his little green heart, genuinely asking for information. That was nice, Tony could get used to that. "Despite Thor putting his hammer through it's ... chem? Thing. The symbol for life?"

... Yeah, that was never not going to annoy Tony. Goddamn wishy-washy, 'words of power', magic shit. But. Okay. If he just mentally designated the thing as the 'on/off switch' in his head, instead of 'magic word that gives life', he could get through this. Or ... possibly not, if they were as wrong as he thought they were, maybe it wasn't an on-off switch at all, but still.

"It's still glowing," he pointed out, instead. "I'm not good at magic, but I think most things that stay glowing once you think they're turned off are bad news. And ... I'm not sure treating this thing as a golem is really the right thing to do."

Because the whole 'chem' thing, the aim-for-the-word-life-on-its-chest, only worked if they were assuming that this thing was the same kind of magically animated construct as the classical golem. If the Allspeak was having trouble between 'golem' and 'robot' just because Asgardians were irritatingly blasé about categories and not, for a random example, because it (or rather, Thor) wasn't completely sure if the creature actually _fit the concept_. If it was because Thor was secretly worried that the thing in front of him was a _bit_ more complex than that, in which case 'robot' was going to be a better word ...

"Hey, Thor?" Tony asked, abruptly. Because hey, he could actually _ask_ that shit, couldn't he. Thor was a friend, Thor was actually a hell of a lot more intelligent than he let on under all that hair. "Are you really sure, hundred percent positive, that this thing is a golem? As in, magical robot run by words of life and all that crap?"

Thor frowned carefully down at him. Shifting uneasily, almost guiltily, and oh, okay, shit. Yeah, Tony could see the answer already, couldn't he?

"I am not certain of its source," Thor agreed, cautiously. "I have never seen magic of this nature. I am certain that it _is_ magic, I know of no other force that can create movement with no mechanism to work with. But the method of its construction ..."

And the means by which it channeled the magic, and the means, therefore, by which you _shut it down_ ...

"Yeah," Tony said, softly. Smiling tiredly and without rancour up at the guy. "You know, I really hate this magic shit. Don't you?" 

And Thor hesitated for a second, but then grinned sheepishly right on back, and yeah, Tony couldn't blame the guy. Like he said. Thor had the dubious honour of being the most conversant with magic among them. That didn't necessarily mean that he was _good_ at the stuff, did it? Thor was a pretty direct kind of guy. This stuff, weird and wishy-washy, probably wasn't any more fun for him than it was for Tony.

"But ... " Bruce started slowly, drawing Tony, and the conversation, back on track. "If Thor's blow _didn't_ turn the thing off ...?"

Tony nodded, a faint, resigned smile flickering forward. "Then why did it fall silent? Why did it let itself be taken?" He grinned, a quick, slightly vicious expression. "That's the sixty thousand dollar question, alright. And I think ... I think I might have an answer, depending on what JARVIS says when he gets back."

Which, speak of the devil. Or, well, probably JARVIS was just waiting for an opening in the conversation in order to draw Tony's attention, wow, he'd been wandering, hadn't he? But JARVIS' preliminary findings flickered into life on the pull-down almost as soon as Tony'd finished. Two windows, side by side, the strange alien symbols of the golem on the right, some equally arcane but thoroughly human ones on the other. Lines laid alongside each other for comparative purposes, alien-symbols-plus-translation laid against human notation.

And even before his partner said a damn thing, Tony saw it. What he'd been looking for, what he'd been afraid of. Clear as day, and a great deal more potentially alarming.

"I think, sir," JARVIS said, with weary amusement, "that you were right. You'll forgive me, I've already sent a strongly-worded suggestion to the bridge that they might wish to set down and initiate evacuation procedures. You may shortly receive a visit from various angry SHIELD agents?"

Tony grimaced, rubbing agitatedly at his temples. Wonderful. Just what they needed. And exactly the kind of thing that might trigger a response, if their new friend was as alert and playing possum as he suspected. 

"Yeah, how about no," he decided, looking down at the lumpy metal head beside him. "Tell you what, buddy. Initiate an override for the hangar locks, if you can. And ... Thor?" He grinned up at the alien, his best 'we're best friends and you want to help me, right?' expression. "Think you can block the doors a bit more substantially for us?"

Thor stared down at him for a second. A disconcertingly penetrating expression, and Tony was suddenly reminded that Thor had grown up with _Loki_ , and therefore probably had a semi-decent bullshit meter, whenever he decided to use the damn thing. But after a second, blue eyes narrow and considering, Thor nodded slowly.

"If you think it would be wise," he said, thoughtfully. "But Stark? If you think the creature will rise again, should you not be on the other side of those doors?" A small smile, a knowing expression. "Since you are, as you said, rather 'squishy'? At least compared to the Doctor and myself?"

Tony opened his mouth. Glanced at the suddenly impossibly straight expression on Bruce's face. And shut it again.

"... I am going to let that go," he decided. Flicking his fingers chidingly in Thor's general direction, attempting, somewhat unsuccessfully, to glare convincingly at Bruce. "Just because I'm not a god, or a Hulk, does not mean we chivvy me along to safety. I'm the guy who knows what the hell is going on, here, so I think I'll be staying." He paused, shrugged lightly. "Besides. Unless JARVIS has lost his touch, he's already arranged to fly the suit in through the outside entrance. Right, buddy?"

JARVIS barely even graced that with an answer. "ETA two minutes, sir," was all he said, and if he was a bit snippy about it, Tony thought that was entirely for Bruce and Thor's benefit, not his. Not when he was too busy grinning smugly at them both, anyway.

"Yeah," Bruce said, smiling softly around the shaking of his head. "Okay," he murmured, as Thor strode off to barricade the doors, still smiling more than a little himself. "But, Tony?" He shook his head as Tony looked at him properly, waited until he was sure he had Tony's attention. "What _is_ going on here?" he asked, quiet and serious, and Tony felt the grin slide gently off his face.

"Yeah," he said softly. Mostly to himself. Sitting back on his heels to look down at the 'carcass' they'd laid out beneath them, the carcass they'd been about to take apart quite a bit more invasively than a few microcameras and fiber-optic cables shoved into the odd gap or bent plate. The carcass which wasn't a carcass at all, and wasn't just a rote machine, either. 

"Yeah, about that," he repeated, looking back up at Bruce, letting something of what he was feeling, the shame and the shock and the alarm, seep into his features. Watching Bruce go grave and wary in the wake of it. "It isn't a golem," he said, softly. "It took me a minute, took me too long, because it's fucking _magic_ and until Thor started having trouble with his vocabulary I wasn't thinking in that direction. So it took me a while. But it's not a golem. And it's not just a machine, either. No more than JARVIS is just a programme." He smiled, soft and twisted. "And ... for kinda the same reason, really."

Bruce blinked for a second. His brow furrowing again, curious and confused, turning it over, and then ... Then his face cleared, realisation and then alarm, then guilt, flooding behind it.

"Yeah," Tony agreed, into that shock. His smile bright and brittle and the glow of JARVIS on the pull-down overlaid over the glow of the golem in the corner of his eye. "Just like that. Buddy here isn't a golem." Bright, flashing smile, and the denouement. "He's an _AI_."

Not a rote, mechanised labourer. Not a blind, slavish machine, just obeying orders. But an _intelligence_. Dummy at least, possibly JARVIS, it was hard to tell without a better idea of the grammar and the coding and how the fuck you wrote concepts in magic-ese. But even with the base translations, even with just the clusters of concepts strung together, the basic ideograms as translated by alien Allspeak, this thing was way, _way_ too complex for what they'd thought it was. Layer on layer of ideas, written down in structured patterns. Depending on the methods, depending on how you wrote power into concepts or vice versa when you were making an intelligence out of goddamned _magic_ , possibly even more layered than was visible at the moment.

And Thor _had_ said. Even before all this, even before it started niggling at Tony. He'd said he'd never seen that intricate a spell. _Hah_. Well, yes. Because it wasn't a spell. Tony didn't give a flying fuck if it was written in magic-ese, if the motivating force was magic, the same way electricity was generally the motivating force for humans and Earth AI alike. Didn't matter. Spells were rote scripts. This, this was more than that.

And if it was alive, if it was an independent intelligence capable of sensation and identity and understanding, an intelligence capable of laying low when it thought it had to, such as when it was faced with a chestful of hammer courtesy of something like Thor ...

Then it had spent the past half-day lying desperately still on an alien floor while fucking strange creatures crawled all over it, shoving things inside its body, scraping and scratching at the foundations of its self, the inscriptions that gave it life and meaning. A bunch of fucking aliens crawling through its mind and its body, the man with the hammer looming threateningly over it the whole fucking time.

Tony looked into Bruce's face. With the pain-fogged memory of impromptu surgery tearing forward behind his eyes, of enemy faces looming over him and the hands of a desperate man inside his chest, he met the eyes of a man for whom the word 'vivisection' had a deep and personal meaning that only luck and desperation had kept from being a memory.

"This ... will need some fixing, won't it?" Bruce asked, softly. His eyes dark and steady on Tony's, not even looking aside when Thor arrived back, when the god frowned heavily, looking worriedly between them. "This will end ... messily."

Tony tried a grin. Distant, stretched a little oddly across his face. But he tried.

"Maybe," he acknowledged. One hand reaching possessively towards the pull-down monitor, JARVIS by proxy, hovering protectively. "I wouldn't be inclined to friendly, anyway. But ..." He shook his head, remembering Yinsen, remembering that the hands inside you might not necessarily belong to an enemy. "Thor has the Allspeak. We know it works on this guy's language. The only reason we haven't tried speaking yet is because we were being fucking idiots and thinking it was a waste of time. But now ..."

"Now?" Thor asked, quietly, and whoops, yeah, gonna have to fill him in too, yes. "Stark. You wish to speak to this creature?"

Tony grinned, switched it on automatically, trying for casually confident as he looked down at the carefully still head that had been lying beside him the whole time. Looking at the soft, steady glow of an intelligence written in magic, because someone out there in the universe just loved making life _difficult_ for people.

"Yeah," he said, even as the armour made its clanging entrance somewhere down at the far end of the hangar. "Yeah, I think that's going to be the plan, guys."

And hopefully, just hopefully, their new friend was going to be in the mood to listen, and forgive the strange, not-nearly-squishy-enough aliens that had spent the past six hours examining it in increasingly invasive ways. If only because, in their partial defense, said squishies were _really dense_.

"... _Okay_ ," he breathed, with an odd little sideways glance at Bruce, a faint half-smile to match the tiny, rueful thing lurking at the corner of Bruce's mouth. "Right. Thor, buddy? Repeat after me:

"We are really, _really_ sorry ..."


End file.
